The Writer and the World by V.S. Naipaul Essays

Spanning four decades and four continents, this magisterial volume brings together the essential shorter works of reflection and reportage by our most sensitive, literate, and undeceivable observer of the post-colonial world. In its pages V. S. Naipaul trains his relentless moral intelligence on societies from India to the United States and sees how each deals with the challenges of modernity and the seductions of both the real and mythical past.

Whether he is writing about a string of racial murders in Trinidad; the mad, corrupt reign of Mobutu in Zaire; Argentina under the generals; or Dallas during the 1984 Republican Convention, Naipaul combines intellectual playfulness with sorrow, indignation, and analysis so far-reaching that it approaches prophecy. The Writer and the World reminds us that he is in a class by himself.

V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went to England on a scholarship in 1950. After four years at Oxford he began to write, and since then he has followed no other profession. He is the author of more than twenty books of fiction and nonfiction and the recipient of numerous honors, including the Nobel Prize in 2001, the Booker Prize in 1971, and a knighthood for services to literature in 1990. He lives in Wiltshire, England.

Kirkus Reviews

Naipaul, who has long delighted in pricking bubbles of political correctness, will doubtless offend cultural relativists with the bit of Western triumphalism he closes with, but it seems timely in an era of imploding tyrannies: “The idea of the pursuit of happiness .

The Guardian

The Writer and the World: Essays
by VS Naipaul
Picador £16.99, pp416
'The destiny of nations,' wrote Joseph Conrad, 'is to be accomplished in darkness amid much weeping and gnashing of teeth, to pass through robbery, equality, anarchy and misery under the iron rule of military despotism.' VS Naip...

BC Books

Spanning the 1960s through the 1980s, The Writer and the World covers ground with journeys into India, Africa and the Americas, and makes the rounds politically, socially and artistically - everything from Steinbeck in Cannery Row to King Mobutu in the Congo, and anything to illuminate problems a...

India Today

Naipaul, not a backpacker in the dusty alleys of lost cultures and monumental nostalgia but an Inspector of Insanities in half-made societies, destinations in dusk-lands are a way of coming to terms with the world the writer cannot disown - despite the dirt and deformities of the past.